It can be difficult to find a sense of purpose in the work you do. For me, it’s been about balancing a career of passions versus a need to pay rent. It is not often that the two will collide. However, luckily, I’ve found that the work I do at Drury Design, and more specifically for Narcan® Nasal Spray has brought with it a sense of purpose.
If you’ve been living life under a rock for the past few decades then you might not understand our country has been wracked with substance abuse in the form of opioids. The infamous drug has been linked to the highest number of accidental deaths in the United States. Which can be from an addiction gone awry or a simple one-time ingestion at the wrong quantity. It’s a drug that is prescribed by doctors, a drug that is sold on the street, and a drug that is cut with an even deadlier substance.
Narcan® Nasal Spray, however, is a simple over the counter medication that’s designed to rapidly reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. It’s literally one pump into the nostril and after a few minutes your loved one, or even a stranger you stopped to help, is awake again.
Working for a product like this, helping spread awareness for a product like this, educating people on a product like this, has all been very satisfying for me on an impactful level. I feel like I’m making a positive change in the world, and the response I’ve been getting from people on the streets of New York is proof of that.
Most of the work I do is usually tied up in NDA’s and often doesn’t leave the screens of the clients we produce it for, but for Narcan® the whole point is to spread this information as far and as wide as possible. So I’m going into detail on what I’ve been able to accomplish for them here on this blog.
At first we were working on testimonials from people with direct experience with opioid overdose.
Being an expert on remote video directing, I was leading the effort in recording personal stories from people across the coucntry on how they were able to save lives using Narcan® Nasal Spray. We were virtually in their homes and listening to them tell life-and-death stories about their loved ones. I knew then that this campaign was going to be important.
Creatively speaking, these raw videos were visually coming in a little flat. We are recording either on a laptop or on a smart phone so there’s no dramatic lighting or second cameras to rely on. We had to get creative in the post-production department. And that’s exactly what we did.
We created an aesthetic that felt like a living, breathing, art form. Using all the skills I’ve developed over the years I leaned into this tactile stop-motion aesthetic. Words were animated in to emphasize their stories and different pieces of art were utilized whenever necessary.
Though we had a specific style, it certainly felt like each video was its own creation - building from scratch each time.
We created something special and the videos now live on in their Instagram and YouTube channels. You can see them grow aesthetically over time. We’ve since distilled them down to these bite-size moments that anyone can ingest through social media channels.
Our next challenge with Narcan® was to create a series of educational videos to explain how to use the product, when to use the product, and any pitfalls or legal issues associated the product.
I knew this would be a large creative lift no matter what. So my plan was to create a workflow that would work for me. I needed something I could work with in a quick enough fashion as we had six videos on our plate at once.
Working with a designer at Drury Design we decided to base the concept on the omnipresent CPR posters that you see throughout bars and restaurants. If you’ve ever walked through a series of eclectic dive bars you’ve surely seen what they’ve done with these necessary posters.
What starts as necessary education becomes a fun experiment as you get to see dancing instructors or famous movie characters acting out what to do in the event that someone is choking. We thought it was so much fun to play with what is normally such a serious subject. This is as much a life-and-death situation as an opioid overdose. So we thought, if they can have fun surely we can have fun too.
So taking inspiration from those, and from the instructions you’d find inside an airplane safety manual, we developed a series of posters for each educational video.
It was my plan to animate each poster by adding depth to the 2D piece of art like something out of a puppet show.
With this plan in mind we could have our artist draw out original characters, our designer build them into a poster, and have it handed over to me as an illustrator file so I could animate each element inside After effects.
We ended up creating some of the most involved pieces of animation I’ve ever worked on. And the finished product has been a hit! The videos now live on their social media channels as well as their YouTube page and main website! Not only that, but they’ve asked for more! We’re now working on our 9th educational video and the workflow has only gotten more seamless.
Our next challenge with Narcan® was to create something more personal that resonates with real people rather than anything animated.
Narcan® wanted to hear from people on the street and get personal with those who weren’t researched or prepped beforehand. While all our testimonials were true stories, we certainly gave our appointments time to collect themselves and present their stories in the best possible light. Narcan® wanted to move beyond the prep and onto something more instant.
So we thought, here we are in New York City, let’s use that to our advantage and get out on the street to actually talk to people!
And that’s exactly what we did!
I hired a friend of mine who is an expert with a steadicam, grabbed a microphone and just started walking the streets of Manhattan, asking people what they knew about opioid overdoses, if they had had personal experiences with the drug and if they knew how easy it was to save someone’s life with Narcan® Nasal Spray.
The results were fantastic.
We got real responses from real people in real time. Strangers on the street giving us their honest opinions on how they viewed the destructive nature of opioids in America. It was enlightening to see what people really thought as they weren’t afraid to give us their honest truth.
Our first outing was an experiment in how the world views the epidemic.
Do they think it’s a problem of pharamaceutical overprescription or is it a problem of addiction? Do people deserve to be saved or should they face the consequences of their actions? Our goal was to break the stigma around opioid addiction and spread awareness that it isn’t always someone looking for a high. That it could be your grandmother facing the pains of a hip replacement and suddenly can’t ween off her new meds.
Our second outing was focused on saving lives.
We wanted the people to know that it could be easy to bring someone back from an overdose - that there was a product out there capable of saving a life in less than a few minutes. The results were better than we could’ve imagined. More people than we thought were educated in the matter, they knew the Narcan® name and they were ecstatic to receive a free box of it from us after the interview was finished.
Overall, I’m happy to say this work has had the most positive impact of anything I’ve ever worked on. I’m so very proud to be creating this work and I’m happy to have received all the accolades for it over the years.
We’ve won Gold, Platinum, Silver, etc etc. Different awards from different agencies over the years.
We still have a happy working relationship with Narcan® and we still continue to put out award-winning positive cultural-shifting work for them.
Fo anyone who has ever participated in our street interviews I want to take this time to personally thank you for your participation. I hope you never have to use your Narcan® device, but I do hope you spread the awareness and education to your friends and family - because, as we’ve learned, it doesn’t matter who you are, any person at any time can be at risk of an opioid overdose.